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You’re in the right place for our media coverage, blog posts, and event information. Our work spans a range of topics, all connected by our commitment to elevate caring and concern for the common good at school, at home, and in our communities. You can review what’s new below or use the dropdowns to sort by topic and category.
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After a busy week in both the legal and administrative landscape of higher education, MCC’s Brennan Bernard offers an intentional approach to college admission in Forbes.
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As devastating as the pandemic has been, it has also exposed wide holes in our social fabric. We're in an epidemic of loneliness, exacerbated by decades of a competition-based mindset and innate need to "prove" our worthiness, writes Chris Prange-Morgan in Psychology Today, However, she writes that we can learn from one another’s struggles as well as grow from helping one another and accepting help. Furthermore, studies show we might be ripe for collective change.
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Modern society has torn us apart in many ways. Grown kids scatter across the country and around the globe. More people live alone than ever before. Polarized ideology divides family and friends. And perhaps most insidious, social media spotlights supposedly idyllic lives that can make our own existence seem isolated and pathetic. The result: We’re growing more and more lonely. And it’s killing us, figuratively and literally.
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Though we’re in a better spot than we were a year ago, with a vaccine that shields most of us from severe COVID-19 symptoms and with kids back in school, this latest surge caused by the Omicron variant feels reminiscent in many ways to the darkest seasons of the pandemic. The good news is that parents can be a stabilizing force in their kids’ lives during this era of unpredictability
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Despite declaring itself awake to inequality in 2020, it has become only too easy for the U.S. to look away in 2021.
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Boston-based Friendshipworks and a new film are teaming up to combat loneliness. Learn more in this video from NBC featuring MCC’s Rick Weissbourd.
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“‘We have big holes in our social fabric,’ said the report’s lead author and Making Caring Common faculty director Richard Weissbourd, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Kennedy School. ‘We need to mobilize coherently and strategically to assure that far fewer Americans are stranded and disconnected.’”
A new study that examines rates of loneliness across the U.S. and within the Christian church found that three in 10 U.S. adults experience loneliness at least once daily. Read more in this Christian Post piece.
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“‘Covid made more people lonely and made lonely people lonelier,’ Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd says. He blames increased social isolation and pandemic-related anxiety, grief and depression, which often fuel each other.’
Read more about the prevalence of loneliness in our culture and steps to address it in this Washington Post piece by Steven Petrow.
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“Parents need to ask themselves how much of their own hopes and needs are getting confused with what is best for their child—their own status concerns, their competitive feelings with other parents, their belief that the college their child attends is a clear and public reflection of their success as parents, their hopes that their child will live out their particular dreams or compensate for their shortcomings.”
Read more sound, sane advice for families as college admissions decisions start rolling in in this Forbes piece by Brennan Barnard.
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Our 2021-22 Youth Advisory Board represents a diverse group of young people who will work with Making Caring Common to make schools and communities more just, caring, and respectful places.
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When it comes to relationships, a new Pew survey suggests that family and children are more meaningful to Americans than romantic partners.
Read more in this Business Insider piece, which also cites MCC’s 2020 report on fathers feeling closer to their children since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Gratitude is about more than saying “thank you.” If we want to help kids truly develop gratitude, adults need to go a step further — they need to teach kids to notice (who or what we’re grateful for) and think (about why we’re grateful), on a regular basis.
Read more about Making Caring Common’s strategies for developing gratitude in children in this Usable Knowledge piece.
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“Rather than telling our kids the most important thing is that they’re happy, we should be telling them the most important thing is that they’re kind.”
Listen to this great interview with MCC Faculty Director Rick Weissbourd in the Shah Family Foundation’s Catalysts for Change podcast.
Does our future include social robots to help combat loneliness?
It may sound like a sci-fi movie, but according to CMS Wire, "conversational AI bots are becoming the norm in Asia, and are beginning to be commonplace even in the United States."
Looking for ways to help anxious students? Making Caring Common Faculty Director Rick Weissbourd suggests:
1. Connect every student to an adult at school
2. Discover what each student is anxious about
3. Focus on building community
Hear more in this short video by Usable Knowledge:
The Voice of Islam Radio’s Drive Time podcast interviewed MCC’s Rick Weissbourd about the role of values and ethics in day-to-day life. Take a listen on SoundCloud!
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"I think of loneliness as a social failure, not as an individual failure. And when you see that large numbers of people are lonely, I think it’s a sign that communities aren’t functioning well, that we don’t have a social infrastructure that really functions very well," says Rick Weissbourd.
In this Popular Science piece, Morgan Sweeney writes about pandemic isolation and how we can work to "overcome America's invisible health crisis."
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Did you know that September is sexual health month?
The Philadelphia Inquirer featured our research in this article discussing how young people are often looking for more information about how to create and sustain healthy romantic relationships.
What are some pros and cons of working from home?
The last 18 months have been tiring and stressful for parents. At the same time, the pandemic also gave many fathers more time at home with their kids.
Dads are reevaluating their work-life balance, writes Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic.
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